last night's double feature: bonjour, tristesse and johnny eager

My DVD player, my trusted companion for these many years, has gone the way of all things mortal. One day it hesitated to open its drawer; soon it was refusing entirely, as if it were terribly weary and needed to sleep. I stuck coins on its little metaphorical eyes and put it out for the vultures to strip.

So until the new one shows up, I'm digging through my stacks of old VHS tapes while my Netflix languish on the coffee table. My original idea was to watch Bonjour, Tristesse and Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane as a sort of coming-of-age evening, but Johnny Eager was too inviting and I couldn't pass it up.



*SPOILER ALERT*

I am far fonder of Bonjour, Tristesse than it deserves. Otto Preminger took a slim, cool, Electra-tinged and gallic hipster-novel and bloated it up to Hollywood size, saturating its colors, softening its sociopathic edges, pushing the very central sex at least out of the frame so that its constant pressure did not feel so very French. In fact, un-Frenching it sort of sums up Preminger's mode of operation.

The plot in a nutshell is this: the teenaged Cecile and her father are rich, beautiful, and live for fun along the French Riviera in the 1950s, using people for amusement and discarding them easily when they begin to bore or demand. When her dead mother's friend comes to marry her father and rearrange their lives, Cecile takes action, and tragedy ensues.

The very French Raymond who today would be played with lip-smacking gusto by Vincent Cassell is here presented with British charm and good humor by the very British David Niven, and the imposing, doomed, aging beauty Anne who ought to be played by Catherine Deneuve at age 47 is instead given to the unimpeachably British Deborah Kerr. There's something wonderfully earnest in the way Kerr listens to people onscreen which makes her palatable even when miscast, and of course Niven is always the soul of affability, important since his character is so shallow that in the wrong hands our sympathies might be lost entirely, and Niven never allows it.

The real centerpiece of course is Jean Seberg as Cecile, so ravishingly hip that if you saw her in a club today she'd STILL be the hippest girl in the room. My favorite part of the movie, in fact, is a b&w framing device Preminger uses to contrast the melancholy present with the vivacious and colorful flashbacks. Although Seberg's voiceover narration is wooden and uninspired, Preminger lets us gaze into her beautiful eyes for long stretches and follow her around Paris in the fifties while she deftly avoids emotional entanglement. My favorite bit is in a little underground dance club peopled by obvious bohemians (a young artist wearing the horizontally-striped shirt which was the stereotypical garb of the Bohemian Frenchman in Bugs Bunny cartoons, a lesbian dressed like Brando in the Wild One, et al). The painter and Cecile's more elegant escort begin fighting over her; without missing a beat, her face goes slack and she walks without a word into la chambre des dames to suffer her bad memories (which is what she does when she's alone) until they've sorted it out. My other favorite bit, also in the b&w frame, is when Cecile dances with her garcon-du-jour while Juliette Greco sings the cool, melancholy theme song. My OTHER favorite bit is the last shot, when Cecile finally shows us some genuine emotion. That's my favorite. We're building up to it, all film long, and the fascination of Seberg does not let us down.

In the end, it works for me despite the clenched-teeth, forced gaiety of the "fun" times, a fun which consists of gambling, eating out, drinking, and the occasional conga line; in short, a "fun" which is stripped of all truth or spontaneity and contrived by a scriptwriter under orders from a director that there's a big, epic party-scene needed and what can you come up with at short notice? It works in spite of clunky, cinemascope editing which lets the story lapse for long moments to show the epic scale of the set-pieces. It works against all odds because even when miscast, these actors know their chops. The awkward scene in which Anne overhears her lover betraying her, adeptly elided in the book and clumsily spelled out here, works because Kerr's face so easily and completely becomes the momentary embodiment of horror and shame.


Then there's Johnny Eager. Brilliantly written. Never predictable. Lana Turner is impossibly luscious, and, it turns out, not a bad hand in the way of acting, or movie-starring, anyway. Robert Taylor does what is demanded and carries it alright, and Van Heflin steals the damn picture with his sad-sack intellectual sidekick, a role for which he took home one of those rare well-deserved Oscars.

This is not your everyday gangster picture. It's not only the script, it's the cinematography, too: unobtrusive but stunning choices about where to put the camera, how to frame, what face to show and when. There are big hunks of conversation during which Heflin's face is far too fascinating to ignore even though he's not talking at all, and Harold Rosson knows it.

Johnny Eager is one for the ages. It's easily one of my favorite gangster pictures: this despite a certain uncomfortableness I suffer with Robert Taylor, which has to say something, since he's in virtually every scene. I don't hesitate to call it one of the greats.